The electric guitar arrives in modern memory already screaming. Feedback hangs in the air, amplifiers cover the stage, and the player carries the posture of someone who has decided the room belongs to them. Rock culture built that image so successfully that rebellion can seem like a natural property of the instrument, something waiting inside…
In late 1912, Pablo Picasso assembled a guitar from paperboard, coarse thread, twine, and wire in his studio on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. The paperboard was the heavy laminated stock used for commercial hat boxes and shoe boxes. It bent, creased, and retained the pressure of the hands that worked it. Nothing about the…
The strings were already near their physical limit when Fred Carter Jr. began to play. On November 16, 1968, Paul Simon sat inside Columbia’s Music Row Studios in Nashville with a Martin D-18 tuned to open C, fingerpicking the foundational rhythm of a new song. Across the room, Carter listened with a smaller Martin 000-18…